Show local image previews in the TUI

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#35,824 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
54/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked proof-of-concept commit and the codex-tui test suite. Trace how final responses, terminal resizing, transcript scrolling, and codex resume are handled, keeping internal image reads separate from explicitly referenced images. Done means Kitty previews work with the stated fallbacks and remain correct across those states.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

CLI enhancement TUI

What variant of Codex are you using?

Codex CLI (TUI), tested in Kitty

What feature would you like to see?

When Codex references a local image in its final response, it would be useful to show a small preview directly below the path.

Right now, every referenced image has to be opened separately. This becomes inconvenient when working on UI, screenshots, generated images, or other visual tasks.

The original path should remain visible and clickable. The preview should preserve the image's aspect ratio and remain available after resizing the terminal, scrolling through the transcript, or reopening the session with codex resume.

Only images explicitly referenced in the final response should be shown. Images that Codex opened internally while working should not appear in the transcript.

On terminals without the required image support, or when a file is missing or cannot be decoded, Codex should simply leave the path as normal text.

Additional information

I built a proof of concept for this behavior:

https://github.com/Kpyruy/codex/commit/aaea18d724554c8ec108ba9c3a26a40a7fb6e8f8

It uses the Kitty graphics protocol and supports PNG, JPG/JPEG, WebP, and GIF files. Previews are reconstructed from the saved final response and the session working directory, so they also work after codex resume without storing image data in the conversation history.

The targeted image, streaming, and resume tests pass locally, as does the full codex-tui test suite.

I am opening an issue first as requested in the contribution guidelines. If this approach fits the project's direction, I would be happy to prepare a pull request if invited.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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